Dungeon Core Academy: Books 1-7 (A LitRPG Series) by Alex Oakchest (book suggestions txt) 📕

“She isn’t undead. She’s becoming a wraith. If we can get her to town, Cynthia might be able to reverse it.”

“Get her to town? A likely story! Call off your monsters, if you’re speaking true.”

“These aren’t mine.”

“I know what cores do,” said Riston. “I know what you can make. Such creatures could only have been made by a core.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Look at them!”

“There’s one thing you’re forgetting, Riston. A question you should ask.”

“What?”

“Who makes the cores? We can create monsters, but who creates us?”

“You are forged.”

“Exactly. Our existence proves we aren’t the only ones who can conjure things.”

“Call them off, core.”

“They aren’t my monsters, you stupid prat!”

A guard tossed his spear to the ground and ran forward, stopping directly under the mosquitos. “I’ve got it! I know what to do! If hurting them makes them copy themselves, then we need to heal them!”

He took a glass vial from his pocket. “This is my hemorrhoid medicine,” he said.

He threw it at a mosquito. The glass smashed on its body. Liquid and glass rained back down on the guard.

Nothing happened to the insect.

For a second, anyway.

Soon, it copied itself.

It seemed the damage they took only had to be slight for a copy to be made. We couldn’t so much as throw a pebble at these things without doubling our problems.

The creatures formed a tighter circle above us. Their wings flapped, slapping together like a giant clapping his hand.

The geologists looked to the guards.

The guards looked to Riston.

Riston, using his hand to block the sunlight from his eyes, was whispering something under his breath.

It was then that I noticed a series of blue marks on his palm.

Tattoos. I’d never seen them before because he obviously covered them up. He probably had some kind of paste. The kind that criminals buy on the black market to cover their crime brands when they look for work. But being out here in the intense wasteland heat, constantly wiping sweat from his brow, had faded it.

Riston’s tattoo was stupid. Firstly, it depicted an open palm. Yes, he had tattooed a palm on his palm. Sitting on top of it was a brain. The brain had eyes and a mouth, and it had strange little lines emanating from it. Behind it, for no discernable reason, were the words ‘I love mom.’

But the ridiculousness of his tattoo wasn’t important. More important was what it told me.

Riston was a mage!

I knew this because of the style of the tattoo; the way the lines almost seemed to move on his hand, as thought they were buzzing with energy. This wasn’t a tattoo he’d gotten when he was drunk with his pals. It was done at a mage college with mana-infused ink.

He stopped whispering and turned away from the mosquitos.

One by one, the insects left, disappearing back down the hole they had emerged from. It was as if they’d been given an order.

Riston clapped his hands.

“Get the girl back to town. There’s an alchemist called Cynthia who may be able to undo the core’s foul work.”

“Everyone knows Cynthia,” said a guard.

“Good. I want you to go straight to Chief Galatee. Tell her what the core tried to do. What he did to this child, and what he planned to do to the other three. Put the barbarian and the kobold in cells. Geologists? Go and…go and…study stones, or something.”

As the guards followed Riston’s orders, he turned to me. “I wouldn’t come back to town, core. You won’t be welcome when everyone learns the truth.”

CHAPTER 7

After Riston and the guards had marched back to town, I’d decided it was best to take his advice and stay away. Right now, Yondersun wasn’t a place I wanted to be. The problem was that the entrance to my dungeon was right next to it.

But given that I’m not a complete dope, I had long ago made three separate dungeon entrances hidden in the wasteland. Completely invisible to anyone but me.

This meant I could get back to my dungeon without going through town. It was taking the long way around, but that gave me time to think.

First, it made me consider how happy I was to be going back to my dungeon. The gloom was comforting. Lots of people add a grim connotation to the word darkness, but it can be cozy. It’s better than the sun. The sun gives life, sure. But it also burns. It dries riverbeds. It scorches crop fields if you let it shine too much without watering them. The sun gives life with one fiery hand, takes it with another.

Maybe that was my problem: spending too much time in the sun. I was made for the dark, and maybe spending too much time above ground did things to a core that the Dungeon Core Academy forgers could never predict.

Either way, my route home gave me time to dwell on how to fix things. And being no nearer to the answer, I asked Gulliver and Wylie to meet me in my core chamber.

“And they just took Shadow and Eric away?” said Gulliver.

“That’s right. The girl was underground,” I said. “Something had started to turn her into a wraith. She was too far gone to talk. Or too scared. Either way, she didn’t have any answers.”

“It makes me so mad!” shouted Gulliver. He punched the wall, yelped, and then put his bloody fist to his mouth.

“Calm down, Gull.”

“It makes me so mad too!” shouted Wylie, punching the wall.

He also yelped.

And also put his bloodied fist to his mouth.

“Just calm down, you two. Let’s think this through.”

“You don’t seem as bothered as I’d expect. This isn’t even my dungeon. It